Supreme Court justice still fights racism

Mary Sanchez Tribune Media Services

October 26, 2007|Mary Sanchez Tribune Media Services

Make no mistake, Clarence Thomas is a product of racism.

He has been battered and bruised by it as much as the most militant black separatist or the angriest youth who goes out of his way to embody every negative view people hold of black men. Thomas has chosen a very different path, to be sure. But he has kept hold of the anger.

Every man deserves the chance to tell his story, from his own perspective. And now Thomas has given us his. My Grandfather's Son, is the Supreme Court justice's new memoir. Regardless of where you stand on Thomas' jurisprudence, or on the Anita Hill controversy, the book is a story worth reading.

Thomas doesn't tiptoe around the ugly truths. As a child, the double threat of poverty and racism nearly did him in. He tells of being abandoned by his father, of being sent to live with his grandfather with only a grocery sack of belongings, of being cold and hungry, and of being ridiculed by fellow black students for being dark-skinned - "an ABC: America's Blackest Child."

Later, after struggles and success in school, Thomas attended Catholic seminary, where he contended with discrimination both subtle and overt, including a painful taunt about the assassination of Martin Luther King.

Thomas went on to attend Holy Cross College and Yale Law School, but in much of his life to come he was wracked by drinking, doubts and debt.

A clue to Thomas' anger can be discovered in the harsh scolding he received from his grandfather, whom he called Daddy. "You'll probably end up like your no-good daddy or those other no-good Pinpoint Negroes," his grandfather told him, referring to the town where Thomas was born.

Those "terrible words," Thomas writes, "still burned in my memory a decade and a half later. Had Daddy been right after all? I poured myself a large glass of Scotch and Drambuie over ice and downed it greedily, alone with my thoughts and afraid of what lay ahead."

Among his most fervent regrets, he writes, is that he listed his race on his application to Yale law school. "As much as it stung to be told that I'd done well in the seminary despite my race, it was far worse to feel that I was now at Yale because of it."

That is the crux of the Thomas fierce sentiments against affirmative action: Once a person accepts a preference due to his race, his accomplishments will always be suspect.

There is another insult Thomas has had to suffer: that he is a traitor to his race, because he does not uphold the beliefs a black man is supposed to. "I'm out of my intellectual neighborhood and I'm drinking from the wrong water fountain," Thomas said in a speech promoting his book. His critics are "ideologically and intellectually segregating the world again."

To hear Thomas tell it, he has been cut down all his life for what he has achieved, by white people and black. The debilitating affect that has on a person should not be underestimated. But what is also clear from the memoir is that he was raised by a man who believed in self-sufficiency to the point of being unwittingly cruel.

Thomas writes poignantly about the never-ending questioning that people of color often must endure. The suspicion that they only got a shot at the big time because of race or ethnicity. That without the "diversity" edge they'd never make it.

Problem is, that view oversimplifies how the world works. No one makes it on his own. Most of us owe accidents of birth, helpful mentors or just plain lucky breaks for getting a foot in the door. Thomas is not unaware of that fact. But somehow affirmative action is different. A Yale law degree for a black man, Thomas argues, has a different value than the same degree for a white man.

Thomas, apparently, can no more shake the stigma he feels is thrust upon him by affirmative action than he can change his race. A lifetime of hurt can do that to a person, and Thomas' pain is wedged deep. As a Supreme Court justice, he is the law of the land - but, sadly, he is still shackled.

Mary Sanchez is a columnist for The Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413; e-mail her at msanchez@kcstar.com.